


Life in Black and White

by rufeepeach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-05-01 00:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5186087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snow White was raised to hold onto goodness at all times, no matter the costs. No matter the damage she leaves in her wake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life in Black and White

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve had this one speech from the West Wing running around in my head for days. “This is the most horrifying part of your liberalism: you believe there are moral absolutes.” It seemed to apply so well to Snow, and I wish the show would focus more on portraying her ‘hold onto goodness at all costs’ mentality as a weakness rather than a strength. Anyway yeah this came out.

Snow White inherited a lot of things from her mother.

She is beautiful, for one thing, although such things had stopped mattering early into her banishment to the forest. She has her mother’s ebony locks, red lips and fair skin. White as snow, they all say, whatever that means. Her mother had been a keen rider, too, and an excellent archer when the yearly tournaments were held.  

But what all people note, beyond the bravery and the good looks, is Snow’s inheritance of her mother’s good heart. From the cradle Snow White was raised to be good, kind, merciful and forgiving. Good exists in all people – true monsters can be told apart by their scales or horns. Killing is to be saved for the heat of battle, where no other option is available to save one’s own life.

This creed was easy to live by in the woods – Snow could steal without engaging anyone in a fight, and outride any pursuer. The few times someone was  thrown by a spooked horse or hit by her warning shot, Snow White found no fault in her conscience calling it an accident.

When Regina came to her, standing on that hilltop by Daniel’s grave, Snow was crushed when the circumstances of that poor boy’s death were explained to her. The hot, slippery, stinking feel of blood on her hands was her imagination, yes, but chilled her to her core. 

It wasn’t hard to offer herself in exchange. It was the good thing, the kind thing, the heroic thing. Especially knowing that, if she lived, her beloved Charming would be killed in her place. Life would not be worth living without her true love at her side. Regina herself was proof enough of that.

It’s only later, when she’s been awakened by her prince’s kiss, that she’s asked the question that had never crossed her mind. Grumpy looks at her with kind approbation, “What would have happened to the kingdom if she’d won?”

“She didn’t win.” Snow shrugs her slim shoulders, brushing out her hair at her vanity in her beloved old bedroom.  She’d have been happy living forever with Charming and Red and the dwarves in the woods; it’s still good to be home. “Good always triumphs.”

“You offered yourself as a sacrificial lamb, sister,” Grumpy snarls. “If it hadn’t been for that one guard going rogue and letting your prince free, we’d all be back under her thumb by now. And who would have fought for us then?”

“I had no other choice, Grumpy,” Snow sighs. “She had Charming, what else was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to be our princess,” Grumpy mutters. “But I suppose you’re just his wife instead.”

He stomps away without a word. The next morning no one glares, and Snow puts his outburst down to his taciturn nature.

—

It’s Charming who next raises a query, the night after Regina’s banishment. Snow White fought a battle today, fought and won, a battle with her own soul. She could have let Regina die, a woman she’s known from the cradle, without allowing her that most precious of all gifts: a second chance. What would her mother have thought of her, watching over her daughter from heaven, had Snow not risen and allowed Blue to halt the hail of arrows? What monster might she have become to follow in Regina’s bloodied footsteps?

“Snow… I’ve been thinking,” Charming starts, and Snow is stopped by his hesitant tone. Her brave, dashing prince is always so steady and certain; it’s disconcerting to hear him sound unsure.

“What’s the matter, my love?” she asks, concerned. “She’s gone! We should be celebrating.”

“She should be dead, Snow,” Charming tells her, and she pulls her hands back from his, steps away in horror.

“Heroes don’t kill,” she reminds him, patiently. “I almost killed her, and then she tried to kill me all over again. I can’t become like her.”

“I know, but that’s exactly my point,” Charming shakes his head. “I don’t know, I wasn’t raised to be King like you were. But she tried to kill you, Snow, just hours after you spared her. And now she’s banished to the Gods know where, with no limits on her power… what’s to stop her coming back for revenge?”

“If she does, we’ll deal with her then,” Snow assures him. “You have to understand, Charming: I’ve known her since I was a child. I couldn’t just watch her die… I couldn’t kill her. I just couldn’t do it.”

“She killed your father, Snow, and hundreds of your people… she’s slaughtered whole villages in pursuit of you. I’m no more bloodthirsty than you are but isn’t enough enough?”

“I can’t kill her, Charming,” Snow shakes her head. “I already killed her true love. I’ve taken enough from Regina, and one day, in her banishment, she’ll see the error of her ways and come around. There is good in her, I know it.”

“I know,” Charming nods. “And I love that about you. I just… wonder sometimes if that’s enough, for people like her.”

“It is,” Snow reassures him, cupping his cheek, and he smiles, comforted by her certainty. “It has to be, or what’s the point?” She doesn’t regret this decision: Regina’s no more a monster than any other broken soul, and since Snow is the one who broke her – however innocently, however accidentally – how could she be responsible for her death too?

—

The next time doubts arise, Snow White is the one to voice them. “We were heroes today, Charming,” she says, clinging to this fundamental, unshakeable truth. “But… we weren’t kind.”

It’s the first time she’s had to split her mother’s mantra, admit that heroism and kindness, goodness and mercy, don’t always all agree on a course of action. Monsters are scales and horns, those who slaughter without human remorse, and Maleficent is as much a monster as Snow has ever seen. Regina’s a human with human motives: Maleficent is a monster beneath her skin. No child under her care would have been raised in goodness and truth. That part, taking that baby away from her monstrous mother - despite those wrenching, heartfelt pleas - sits just fine on Snow’s chest.

It’s worth it, because now Snow’s daughter can follow in her mother and grandmother’s footsteps. Snow cannot feel remorse for having secured that. One must always be good, kind, and brave: those are the words Eva passed to Snow, and now Snow will pass to little Emma. She doesn’t know what she’d do, if after all their sacrifice and determination to do the right thing at all costs, their child was lost to darkness anyway.

A mother’s first duty is to save her daughter from that terrible fate. And since the moment she learned of her pregnancy, Snow has been a mother above all things.

They vow to be heroes henceforth, to work harder to meet the standards they set themselves. But Snow doesn’t lose sleep at night worried about a monster’s child who’s lost in the wilderness. After all, what good ever came from a dragon?

—

Snow has always prided herself on mercy. It’s easier in Storybrooke, since the chances of accidentally shedding enemy blood are vastly reduced. No death penalty, no soldiers, no guardsmen. Her family are the law.

And then Cora returns, and things become a little murkier. Snows allegiances are tested again, and this time family and goodness stand on opposite sides. To resist darkness is to allow them to die.

Her choice is made in a matter of minutes. She listens to Rumpelstiltskin: she takes the candle, and she ends a life.

She knows what a less kind, less good, less merciful person would say in justification. Cora had killed people, and she intended to gain the darkest kind of power to kill many more. She had to be stopped, permanently, and Snow managed to do that while keeping that dark power contained in a vessel who, while not trustworthy or moral in the slightest, has never attempted mass murder. 

But in the terms Snow lives by, in terms of goodness, kindness, mercy? In those terms, this was the worst day of her life. She has failed, utterly, completely, to live up to the standards she is supposed to embody. All the good work done in saving Regina’s life, in choosing mercy over expediency, trusting in goodness and second chances instead of falling pray to distrust, doubt and darkness.. all lost here and now. She is a cold-blooded killer; a murderer.

Once more, she stands before Regina, the blood of that poor woman’s only family again dripping from her hands. This time she is a willing, begging sacrifice. How can she live with this pain, this knowledge that she has failed?

There is a black spot on her formerly clean, pure heart, and Regina enjoys showing it to her. This is what happens, she thinks, when success is valued over honour.

They’ve succeeded, yes, but at what cost? 

It was different when it was Maleficent’s monster-child; different when it was Regina’s life spared; different when it was Daniel’s blood so innocently spilt. Cora’s death can have no excuses, there can be no deferral of guilt, no making her peace with it.

Snow takes to her bed after Regina spares her life, unable to live with what she’s done. Rumpelstiltskin guards her against Regina’s wrath, but Regina won’t come: Regina had her chance, and she didn’t take it.

She asks him, when she has the words. “How do you live with yourself?”

She figures he should know. He’s killed enough people in the name of finding his son, after all, done the math and counted the costs, called it all a wash. But of course he is no use: Rumpelstiltskin is evil, a creature of darkness, a villain, no matter what Belle may have convinced herself to believe. Rumpelstiltskin lost himself to the darkness a long time ago. How could he possibly be able to relate to Snow White, who has lived her whole life in service to the light, to goodness and kindness, and who had never once willingly spilled another’s blood until that fateful day?

Snow ignores his answer: it is of little use. She didn’t do the right thing, and she won’t try to convince herself that she did. Heroes don’t kill. Snow White has lived her life by that creed, and she won’t let a villain like Rumpelstiltskin sway her from her course.

—

Rumpelstiltskin dies killing Pan, and Snow White doesn’t attempt to mourn him.

That he died killing another washes out the sacrifice, as far as she’s concerned. Trapping him in a box was one thing: someday, somehow, perhaps he could have been retrieved and reasoned with, redeemed. Even if he had to lose his freedom, killing him removed all chance for a second chance. Rumpelstiltskin had had his second chance, and he’d ruined it by running around Neverland, killing Lost Boys. Snow had only ever been shooting to incapacitate, never to kill. Even if he had saved Charming’s life from the Dreamshade, that one mercy can hardly wipe out centuries of blood and murder.

No, the world is safer with the both of them gone. The world rights itself: cruel villains suffer, and good, kind heroes come out the victors. 

It never occurs to Snow to stop and wonder whether life might have been easier if Pan had been killed sooner, in Neverland. Just as she never wondered whether the Curse might never have touched her or her family, had she allowed the arrows to pierce Regina’s heart that day.

Regina has redeemed herself. Snow had been right: Regina has come into the light, a little weathered and jaded maybe, but light nonetheless. Regina is proof that everyone deserves a second chance, and that killing is never the answer.

—

Months later, when Regina’s light magic bursts from her palms and incapacitates the Wicked Witch, and she stops Rumpelstiltskin – not dead, and heart still full of darkness and evil – from killing the broken woman on the floor, Snow White is vindicated. Heroes don’t kill. Snow hears those same words, that lifelong creed, echoed back to her by the woman whose life those words spared that day in the palace yard. And in that moment, it’s all worth it.

What a fool she was to ever have doubted herself, even for a second. She is a hero, Maleficent and Rumpelstiltskin and all those other horned, scaled monsters are villains, and that’s where it ends. Goodness and kindness prevail.

—

Snow White never doubts again: a year later her world shatters into a million pieces, and she is left scrambling in the dust. With no certainty left in the world to cling to, her creed falls apart in her hands.

All the work she’s done, the sacrifices she’s made, the hard, dangerous decisions that have kept her good and kind… they all come to naught. Emma is good, brave, kind, full of light, in large part because Snow grit her teeth and did a hero’s work, allowed monstrosity to belong to a monster. It is precisely those qualities that send her hurtling into the heart of the Dark One’s curse, to save Regina.

Regina, Snow thinks bitterly: the same woman she saved all those years ago, allowing hundreds of innocent deaths to go without vengeance. It is in saving her that her daughter is lost to the darkness. Perhaps there is a cruel, twisted justice to that.

Her father was always the hand of justice. Her mother was merciful, and it is in her mother’s image that Snow has always worked, never wavered. Now, she wonders if she shouldn’t have taken more from the one and less from the other. Now she wonders if justice doesn’t sometimes have to be firm and unwavering, even if it is unkind, even if it is not heroic.

Perhaps, sometimes, a hero isn’t what’s needed. Snow White’s heroics gave Rumpelstiltskin what he needed to cast the curse by letting Regina live. Allowing her to die would have kept the dark curse where it belongs, and in turn kept that darkness from her beautiful, brave daughter.  

She doesn’t regret letting Regina live, not now after seeing her redeem herself. But in her bitter moments, right after Emma vanishes, Snow finds herself resenting Regina’s safety. Who is she to survive, the murderer, the abductor, the traitor, however redeemed, when Emma may be lost forever?

She doesn’t sleep that night. In the morning, Snow knows who to blame.

Belle is minding the shop, keeping an eye on Rumpelstiltskin’s comatose body, when Snow storms in. Regina is working on a spell to help them find Merlin, but Snow has some words for the curse’s former owner. For the only man who has ever even indicated that, perhaps, killing one person to save hundreds might not always be the wrong decision.

But of course he’s still comatose, and what would Belle know of such things? Belle is as quick to speak of bravery and kindness as any of the rest of them: Belle is a child of the light, and she was the first to cast Rumpelstiltskin out when he turned back to the darkness.

It’s that thought, that memory, that halts her steps, and has Snow turning to the tiny, worried woman behind the counter. She’s reading from a large tome - she’s always reading, it seems - but she glances up at Snow’s presence. Snow White remembers that evening well, when Belle, shaking and broken but resolute as she returned from the town line, collapsed weeping into Granny’s arms in front of everyone. 

No one had mourned him, or been sorry to see him go, Snow least of all; but she had felt a tug then for Belle’s plight. Her Charming had always been as unwaveringly heroic as Snow herself: how awful it must be, she’d thought then, to have your true love be someone so irrevocably lost in the darkness. 

“How did you do it, Belle?” she asks, and Belle frowns in confusion.

“Do what?”

“Give up on him,” Snow says. She nods to the back room where Rumpelstiltskin sleeps on in stasis, blissfully unaware of the turmoil his weakness and vice has brought on the town. “You didn’t see him as a monster, like we did, you loved him-“

“I love him,” Belle corrects, quickly. “I never stopped, I just… I had to let go.”

“You gave up on him ever redeeming himself,” Snow continues, her voice a little awed. “You sacrificed him for the good of the whole town, even knowing what it would do to him. What it would do to you.”

“I had to,” Belle shrugs, uneasily. “I… something in me snapped. I didn’t understand what he was going through, I suppose. He didn’t tell me, because he thought I’d turn away if I saw him so weak. But in the end, maybe that didn’t matter. He was hurting people… he was killing people. He’d have killed more, and… I was the only one who could stop him. And at the time, that seemed like the only surefire way to do it.”

“Was that heroic?” Snow asks, not sure herself. “I don’t know… I used to be so sure what I’d do, that I could make hard choices, but… I don’t know now.”

“Because now it’s someone you love who’s cursed,” Belle finishes for her. “And you’re realising it’s not as black and white as it looks.”

“There’s darkness and there’s light,” Snow argues, stubborn to the last. “There’s good and there’s evil.”

“And which one is Emma now?” Belle fires back, without pause. “If she does now what he did, kills anyone who threatens what she loves, her happiness… if she uses darkness to serve good intentions, will you be able to turn your back?”

There’s something in her voice, hard and sharp like Snow has never heard it from sweet little Belle. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Rumple once told me how Regina was inches from execution, and you let her live,“ Belle tells her, her voice low and implacable. "Not only that, you banished her to her castle and left her with her power and her freedom, once your own safety was secured.”

“So?” Snow frowns, not understanding the accusation in Belle’s voice. “I couldn’t kill a woman I’d known from birth. I had to give her a second chance, and look how far she’s come!”

“I was locked in that castle. If you’d been more willing to turn your back on her, I wouldn’t have spent thirty years locked in her prisons. But then, if Rumple had successfully killed Zelena, Marian would have lived, and she wouldn’t have done what she did to my husband in New York.”

“What did she do?” Snow White asks, afraid of the answer, afraid now of what a woman whose life she heroically spared might have done once set loose.

“She tortured him in a hospital bed,” Belle tells her, shortly. “For hours. He told me when he was dying, he… he didn’t want to die and have me think he worked with her willingly.”

“I didn’t know that,” Snow White murmurs. 

“I know,” Belle nods. “I just can’t help but think that if she’d just been dead, like he’d thought, all of this could have been avoided. I used to condemn him for what he did, for how willing he was to kill Pan, to kill Zelena. I thought it was a matter of good and evil, right and wrong.”

“And now?” Snow asks, needing the answer as much for herself as for Belle.

“Now… now I think that heroes are for children, for story books.” She sighs, and shakes her head. “I’m doubting these days whether there really are moral absolutes. Whether any action is inherently good or evil. Maybe sometimes giving up hope in someone’s redemption is the least worst option. Maybe sometimes mercy does more harm than good.”

“Heroes don’t kill,” Snow White whispers, through bloodless lips.

“Are you going to say that when Emma comes back and starts taking the lives of those she thinks threaten her family? Are you going to keep giving her second chances?”

Snow doesn’t have an answer for that. The thought of doing what Belle did, standing on that edge with that horrid dagger in her hand, forcing her own child out of town and into the wilderness, all alone… it turns her blood cold. 

“No,” she says, with a firmness she doesn’t feel. Belle doesn’t believe a word of it, but then Belle’s had to learn how to tell truth from lies.

“But you already did, for Regina,” she accuses, calmly. Snow’s hackles raise. "And maybe it was the right thing, after all. Maybe there is no right and no wrong here. So how can you trust you won’t do it again?”

“What are you accusing me of?” she demands. Belle stares her down.

“I think you put the people you care for and your heroics above everything, and it clouds your judgement,” Belle tells her, simply, calmly. Kindly, even. “It’s admirable to love so deeply and to live by a code, but look what it’s lead you to do. Sometimes heroism is sacrifice, and having to live with that sacrifice after its made.“

Snow gapes at her, for that is, of course, the one lesson her mother never imparted. In all her life, Queen Eva had never sacrificed a thing. How many times has Snow sacrificed her life in the name of saving Regina’s? And yet, somehow, someone else always seems to do the dying for her kindness. What is Belle, who spent those years locked away in a castle Snow never thought to liberate once her lands were secured, but proof of that?

That thought is sickening, unsettling, and she knows the agony flashes across her face, because Belle sighs, then, the fight going out of her, a small smile coming to her lips. She is conciliatory without being remotely forgiving, and Snow is starting to see how this deceptively delicate woman caught the heart of the Dark One. “I’m sorry, I was up all night watching him, thinking about all of this. I like you, Snow. I just… I don’t think I want to be like you, anymore.” She closes the book she was studying on the counter; it slams shut with a ring of finality.

Snow recognises it: the Author’s final work, Isaac’s opus. ‘ _Heroes and Villains_ ’.


End file.
